Episode 8 - Finding the Courage to Face Life’s Challenges

We all face challenges in our lives, whether that’s struggling with a difficult client, dealing with relationship problems, fixing health or financial problems, or even dealing with grief. 

It can often feel like we’re in a never-ending cycle that we will never break free from. No matter what your challenges, remember that each day is a new day, and it’s okay not to feel okay.

In this episode, Eleshia shares the story of one of her biggest struggles; her miscarriage, and how she has learned to face the month of June anniversary with strength, courage, and bravery. 

As she explains in the episode, June is also when her mother passed away, which makes the month a time when she often wants to hide away from the world and deal with her grief alone. 

But instead, she’s welcoming the month of June with a new mindset: celebrating life, cherishing herself, being committed to honouring what she is feeling, and looking after her wellness and wellbeing.  Won’t you join her? 

You can feel more resilient, energized, and stronger by following Eleshia on Instagram and joining her 28-day wellbeing reset journey. 

If you want to dive straight in without doing the full 28 days, check out the Wellbeing Reset Mini Course with printables on self-care, breathing techniques, recipes, and a whole self-care checklist made just for you.

Eleshia’s Essentials:

• Reach out to other people if you need help in any way, and try not to suffer in silence.
• As hard as it may be, honor your feelings and recognize that it’s not just you feeling this way. 
• Sympathy often isn’t enough- I didn't want to feel like I needed people's sympathy, I just wanted to heal within.
• Life doesn’t always go to plan which is why it’s so important to develop our resilience
• We need to give ourselves time to take a step back, stop working, and just heal
• Moving through grief, obstacles, and other challenges doesn’t happen overnight. It takes patience. 
• I've decided to declare the day that my mom passed away as an Eleshia holiday.

Connect with Eleshia:

• Website
• Facebook
• Instagram

About the Show:

The Eleshia Show is an exciting new podcast that helps empower female business owners to put their well-being first whilst building their businesses. Tune in every Wednesday as my inspiring guests and I discuss strategies, share stories and experiences and dive into how you can build your business whilst trying to navigate real life. The host, Eleshia Harris is here and ready to share her decades of project management and wellness experience to help you start saying ‘Yes!’ to your business and life. 

Show Transcript:

Eleshia Harris: Hi, I'm Eleshia Harris, and I am your host of The Eleisha Show. I am also the founder of eleshialifestyle.com, and I'm so excited that you're here with me and I am here with you. I'm also really appreciative. 

Each week, I'll be sharing strategies and stories and insights to help you enhance your well-being and to build your business while still navigating life. Because sometimes, we often try and separate the two, and let's face it. If you are not well, you have no business. So let's try and work with these two things combined because we can, to enhance your lifestyle. Again, I'm really excited to have you here. I have wanted to put together a podcast for over two years. And so, here I am, ready to share. Let's get into this week's episode.

Hi, Eleshia here with another solo episode. I am so happy to be here with you. And today, we are going to be talking about the changes that I am making for June. I don't want to say that I don't enjoy the month of June, but ever since 2015, it has been a hard month.

June is the month that I lost my mum. And two years whilst grieving her passing, I also had a miscarriage a week after her two-year passing anniversary. So you can imagine the anxiety that I have around the month of June. And I usually feel this coming up at the end of May.

This year, I have decided that I'm going to turn things around. I am going into June with a different mindset. I am going to celebrate life in June. I am going to celebrate myself. I'm going to make sure that I'm looking after myself. I am going to make sure that I am honouring my emotions and the way that I am feeling. And I want you to come with me. I want you to do the same. 

I know how hard this last year has been. We have all been feeling some sort of grief. Be it people, lifestyles, work, health. All of those things. We have grieved something. The life that we knew before 2020, we're all grieving in some way. And if you've listened to the episodes prior to this, there were some really good tools that we discussed, especially in the conversation that I had with Uma about dealing with your primary and your secondary grief.

Usually, I want to sleep for the whole month of June. I'm not going to lie. I usually just want to pull the covers over my head and actually say, "Bye-bye, I will see you in July." But this year, I'm going to really hone in to how I'm feeling but also take responsibility to how I'm feeling.

Before I go into what I'm planning to do, I want you to join me. I just wanted to just talk a little bit more about my miscarriage. It was only when I decided to let people know what had happened, that other people started to talk to me about their experiences too. So I am hoping that by doing this, I am able to help somebody else. 

So, as you know, I had fertility challenges, and we were doing everything that we could to ensure that we were both at optimum health to have a baby. I had just spent 18 months really grieving my mum. And then, I had decided that it was about time that I look after myself and start to think about expanding my family. So we had started to look at things that we could do naturally to do that. And one of the things that we did was acupuncture.

Before I go too deep into the conversation, I just want to disclaimer everything. This is my story. Okay. This is what I did. This is what I'm doing. It worked for me. I can't, a hundred percent, say that it will work for you. And yeah, so I am just sharing my experience.

So we were doing acupuncture, and I had just come back from holiday. I'd spent a great couple of days with my cousin, and we had partied it up. We enjoyed ourselves. But I still wasn't really drinking because I still was trying to make sure that I was looking after myself. So when I came back and realized that I had not come on my period, I was like, "Oh, hmm..." I decided to take a pregnancy test, and it came back positive. But I was like, "Oh, maybe not." Like I've only been working with the acupuncturist for six weeks. Could it happen this quickly? 

So I was due to have a session with him that day. So I decided to quickly grab another pregnancy test, and I took it with me and I said to him, "I think I'm pregnant." And he looked at me in shock. Like I was in shock. He was like, "Okay." And I said I think I should do the test before we do our treatment today. And he was like, "Yeah, go ahead." And it came back and it confirmed. I was pregnant. 

We were both excited that I was pregnant but he was just very cautious. So he was just very cautious and said, "You know, just look after yourself, and let's see how it goes." And I didn't think nothing of that. And then a couple of weeks later, It was time to go to the doctor's to confirm that I was pregnant. So I went to my doctor's. I told her and then she said, just before I was leaving, "Let me know if you get any cramps or any spot. Make sure you come straight back. Go and do a urine test, so that we can get it confirmed properly." And it was then that I noticed that I've been spotting. So she sent me straight to go and have a scan. And when I went to the scan, they said it looks okay. We think that's okay but come back in two weeks so that we can definitely confirm.

So in that two weeks, I was mourning my mum. Grenfell had happened and, yeah, so it was a really dark time. And then when I went back, it was a bright, sunny day. I was singing on my way to the hospital. I was in a great mood. Darren was with me, and we were excited to hear the baby's heartbeat. And then, our worlds came crashing down when the technician said that she couldn't find a heartbeat. And then you start asking, as we do as women, right? We first look at ourselves. Was it something that I did? Had I been exercising too much? Was it something I ate? Had I not gone through enough heartbreak with losing my mum as well? Like I started to think about all of those things, and my emotions just came flooding through. And yeah, poor Darren. He was being as supportive as he could, but again, he was probably thinking the same. But, at this point, we had to just move forward. And for me, I didn't realize that I had different options with regards to the miscarriage because I hadn't miscarried naturally. I could now wait or I could take a tablet or I could come back in to have an operation. Now for me, the operation was not the first place that I would have gone to. However, If I had waited, that was causing me so much overwhelm and anxiety. And I was so traumatized by the fault of doing that. But also, if I had chosen option one or two, I would still have to come back in for a scan. And if there was anything left behind, I would have had to have an operation anyway. So we decided that I was going to do that. That was hard for me. That was really hard for me because we were in the hospital where my mum had passed away. So you can imagine how I was feeling, knowing that I had lost my mum and now I had lost my baby in the same hospital. 

So once we had made that decision, I had to come back on the Monday. So this happened on the Friday. I had to come back on the Monday to have the operation. And I've written a whole blog about this. So I'm not going to go into too much detail. After having this operation, what I will say is, yes, I gave myself time to heal from the operation. I'm so happy that I'd been working with my acupuncturist and I completely, completely trusted him 100% because he had seen the signs before I had. So when he said, " Let's take six months to really work on healing you internally and physically and emotionally," I decided that that was the route that we were going to take. Yes, I was scared. I was scared because I was fastly approaching 39, and I wanted this so badly to happen.  Asking me to wait six months seems like a long time, but I am so glad that I did it because when we did find we're pregnant, I was ready and I knew that I was healed. 

When I was doing more research, I then realized that one in four ladies will have a miscarriage. One in five, if you don't realize that that's what's happening. And I also read that if you are a black lady, you are more susceptible to have miscarriages also. You know, 40% more susceptible to have miscarriages.

And that number blew my mind because it made me think about so many others that have been through the same scenario as I have been and have not been able to talk about it or not knowing that there was support. When I left the hospital, they gave me a leaflet to read. And that was it. There was no aftercare. 

After I had the operation, there was nothing. There was literally nothing. I was told to try again as soon as possible. And it was only when I spoke to my acupuncturist when I went back to him for a treatment. He said to me, "No, let's work on healing your body. Let's work on ensuring that everything is aligned again. Let's make sure that your hormones are aligned." And I am so pleased that I listened to him.

 Where I'm going with this is although I was doing all of the right things, I was still eating healthily, I was resting, I was looking after myself from a physical and emotional standpoint, I was still working. I was still really focusing on work. And as business women, that's what we tend to do. We don't give ourselves enough time to actually stop. So one of the things that I have learned over and over again, because in my experience I have put work, especially when I am working for somebody, I have put work first. And they don't always put you first. Like I learned when it came to being offered a permanent role. That didn't work in my favor. 

So what I am doing for this month, even though I work for myself, I've decided to declare the day that my mum passed away as an "Eleshia holiday." And I will not be working that day. And I know that this will be best for myself, but it will be also best for the clients that I work with because I know I won't be giving them my hundred percent. I'm also going to take the day off afterwards so that anything that comes up, I've got an extra day to take off.

I am 100% committed into looking after my wellness and my well-being, because I know last year when June came around, it wasn't just June, it was July. I was floored with everything else that was going on in the world. It just took me out. And I don't want that to happen again for me or for anybody else who is in this situation. So what would I be doing? I am going to be doing a full-month well-being reset. For those of you who've been following me for awhile, you know that in July of last year, I did a 14-day well-being reset, and I did 14 days of just taking care of myself. But then, I also additionally started to talk to other experts about what they did to look after themselves. And that was kind of me dipping in my toes to expanding on the idea of doing this podcast, and I really enjoyed it. But I didn't have the time or the energy to expand on that last year. As I've said, this has been two years in the making. But this year, I want to leave the end of June feeling as energized as I can feel.

I am going to be doing a 28-day well-being reset, and I'm going to be looking at my sleep, my food, my well-being, my self-care, my relationships, my business. I'm going to be looking at the projects that I want to do for the rest of the year. I am really going to use this month to dream, to dream big, but also whilst looking after myself. I don't want to be feeling in a place where I am really worried about June again. I don't want to be feeling like I want to throw the covers over my head when it comes to June next year. I want June to be different this year. I want June to be celebrated because as much as I miss my mum a lot, I know that she wouldn't want me to be in a place where I am always upset when it comes to moving my life forward without her. So this is what I'm going to do for the month of June. 

So are you with me? And if you don't want to do the whole 28 days, then you don't have to. I have the recordings of the challenge that I put together last year, and you can start with that. In that small course, I have printables to support you. So I have printables on self-care. So I have a self-care checklist. I have a self-care bingo checklist for you to do. I have templates for shopping lists and templates for you to complete your movement and your food diaries. In there, I have resources to recipes. I've also got a few small videos of exercises and breathing techniques. So I've put that all together into a small course, and you can find the details of that in the show notes.

And I will also be documenting how I'm getting on, on Instagram. So, follow my Instagram stories daily, and you'll get a look into how I'm doing. And also, this ties in so nicely to the series that is coming next. And I am so, so excited to be sharing this experience with you. I have collaborated with a dear friend of mine, and we are going to be sharing so much wealth and knowledge on how you can be harnessing your flow to help with your productivity, but also just to help with your well-being and so forth. 

I am so excited to expand on what is coming up in the series. Next week, you'll be getting an introduction into what is in store for you. I cannot wait. 

What we are discussing has been a game changer for me on how I run my business, how I look after myself, and how I am educating myself for my next season of life. So be sure to tune in next week to hear all about what we have in store for you. Until then. Bye-bye.